“Here it is,” said Tirillo digging it out of the bottom of his pocket; he lit it and while the others, kicking, piled up some brush under the pylon, still shouting and dancing, he set fire to the dry grass around it.
The wind blew hard, from every direction, on Monte del Pecoraro, which by now was almost dark, while amid the darts of light from the factory, and the lightning flashes of the storm, there was thunder, and the smell of rain.
The dry grass immediately caught fire, spread the blood-colored flames to the brush, and around Piattoletta, who was screaming, a thread of smoke rose.
His pants, meanwhile, no longer held up by the string, had slid down, crumpling at his bound feet and leaving his stomach bare. Thus the fire, rising from the blades of grass and the brush that the boys were kicking as they shouted, attacked the dry fabric, crackling merrily.
7.
IN ROME
At the foot of Monte del Pecoraro there was a large square, and, near a sign with the legend “End Zone—Begin Zone,” just before the great expanse of fields that stretched to the Aniene, stood the old platform of the 309, which at that point turned, leaving Via Tiburtina, and headed past the apartment blocks of the neighborhood toward Madonna del Soccorso. Alduccio, like Begalone, lived in Building IV, at the end of the main street, a little beyond the market square, where a row of street lamps that, lighting up at dusk beside the two-story houses, gave one the impression of being in the poor neighborhood of some beach town, with the street that after a short ascent seemed to lose itself against the hazy sky, and with the sounds of people who, within the porous walls or in the courtyards, were having dinner or getting ready for the night. At that hour there were lots of boys and youths around; but the true men of the world kept to themselves, in the bars or at the intersections, waiting for night, not to go to the cinema or to Villa Borghese but to gather in some gambling house to play cards until morning. And while some youths here and there in the courtyards strummed guitars, women were still washing dishes or sweeping, while the small children whined; and the buses kept arriving, full of people returning from work. “Bye, Bégalo,” said Alduccio when they were in front of his house. “Bye,” said Begalone, “see you later.” “I’ll wait for you at nine,” said Alduccio, “give me a whistle!” “Okay, but be ready,” said Begalone, going up the dilapidated stairway, which was mobbed with kids. Alduccio lived three or four doors farther on, on the ground floor. Like all the buildings, it had a kind of porch in front of the door, its walls and columns damaged and collapsing. Sitting on the step was his sister. “So, what’re you doing,” said Alduccio. She didn’t answer him, staring at the street. “Damn you,” he said, and went into the kitchen, where his mother was at the stove, cooking. “What do you want?” she said, without turning. “What do you mean, what do I want,” said Alduccio. She turned sharply, disheveled: “You don’t work, you don’t eat, you know,” she said. She was a large, tall woman, almost naked under the grimy cotton housedress, her hair pasted to her forehead with sweat and her bun in disarray, coming undone over her neck and the edge of the housedress. “So what!” said Alduccio, acting unperturbed. “You won’t give me something to eat? Who cares!”
He went past her, into the single room where his whole family slept—in the other room slept Riccetto’s—and began to undress, whistling to show his mother that he didn’t give a damn. “Whistle again,” she shouted from the kitchen, “you bum, and to hell with you and that filthy drunken father of yours!” “Yes, and that big fat whoring mother of mine,” Alduccio muttered between his teeth, while, sitting naked on the bed, he put on his moccasins. “If you’re irritated because of that idiot daughter of yours, forget it, why take it out on me? You don’t want to give me dinner? Don’t give me dinner! What do I care! Just shut up!” “What do you mean shut up,” shouted his mother. “I have to see a son practically twenty years old who should be going for a soldier, and he doesn’t bring home a lira, not a cent, a disgrace.” “God damn, what a pain in the ass you are!” cried Alduccio, who was getting dressed up. But shouts were coming from outside in the street, women’s voices arguing. Alduccio’s mother was silent for a moment, her ears pricked, listening, while the words reached Alduccio as a muddle. “You complete moron!” Aldo’s mother, at the stove, cried, talking to herself. She dropped something in her hurry to go out, and went to the door. She stood there listening for a moment, and then she went all the way out and her voice, too, could be heard shouting with the others. “Listen to this! Why don’t they go piss off!” Alduccio said to himself. After almost ten minutes of squabbling and bickering, on the street or maybe on the landings, he could hear the door opening, banging, but not closing again: his mother had stopped, maybe because she had something more to say. In fact she turned back, on the landing: “You filthy whore,” she began shouting toward the outside, “you’ve always been a whore, and you come and call my daughter a slut!” A voice answered from above, but couldn’t be heard clearly. “I’m goddam fed up!” Alduccio said bitterly. “Just as well!” cried his mother, putting one hand on her hip, responding to that confusion of words he hadn’t heard. “Look who’s talking! And you let your boyfriend give you money to send the children to the movies so you could be alone with him!” The voice from the courtyard or the landing rose two or three tones, and on that extremely high note began to recite a sampler of insults of all sorts: when she finished, it was Alduccio’s mother’s turn again: “You don’t remember,” she cried in a piercing tone that not even Jesus Christ could have shut up, “you filthy slut, when your husband came home and found you with the boyfriend, in the bed, in front of your two kids?” She slammed the door and returned to the kitchen, and there continued by herself, in a voice that vibrated in her throat, as sharp as a knife: “So cut it out, you slut, because tomorrow when I meet you in the square I’ll tear out every hair on your head, damn you!” After a while the door opened again and Alduccio’s father came in. He was drunk, as he was every night. He approached his wife, and started to beat her. But she placed a hand on his chest and pushed him backward: he spun around completely and fell upright onto a chair. But he got up again right away and stubbornly tried again to hit her. From the other room, where Riccetto’s family lived, Riccetto’s sister came out to see if something alarming was happening: she arrived just in time to see her uncle dropping onto the chair a second time. “What do you want here,” the mother said, whirling about furiously, “what do you want!” The girl, with another small Riccetto in her arms, turned on her heels and went right back into her room. “Scum, you and your whole family of parasites and good-for-nothings,” she shouted after her, “it’s four years they’ve been here and never once said, here, take this thousand lire, pay the electric bill!” The father, taking a few minutes to collect himself, managed to get his voice working and, after two or three attempts, said something like: “She’s always making a fuss, that wretched woman!” He got up and, staggering forward and back, made a kind of speech all in gestures: he brought his hand two or three times from his chest to his nose, then made a pirouette with his fingers as if to indicate that an idea all his own was passing through his head; finally, running, in order not to fall, he went into the room where Alduccio was getting dressed, and fell, fully clothed, onto the bed, face up. The wine he had drunk all afternoon had turned him white as a sheet and had as if hardened the couple of inches of beard-roughened skin around his nostrils and at the corners of his mouth, which was dark, damp, and wrinkled like that of a dog. He was all sagging: his arms extended on the bedspread sagged, his half-open mouth sagged, his jaws and the cracks of his eyes sagged, his hair, still black and shiny with sweat, as if brilliantined, sagged. The bulb that hung over the bed illumined one by one the cocoa-colored stains of an old layer of dirt mixed with more recent crusts of dust and sweat on his forehead; a spider web of wrinkles shifted up and down on its own over the skin, stretched and flabby from wine, yellowed by who knows what old illnesses of that diseased liver, packed int
o a body wrapped in old clothes. And here and there were traces of bruises, brown in the center and surrounded by a little nimbus of freckles, blows suffered perhaps when he was a boy, or in youth, when he was a soldier or a laborer, a hundred years earlier. And everything was as if fused by the dullness of wine and lack of food, and the bristles of his four-day beard.
Alduccio was now ready, with his pegged pants and the open-collared striped shirt, the tails outside the pants. He still had to comb his hair. He went to the little mirror in the kitchen, and, having wet the comb at the tap, began to fix his hair, standing with legs spread, because the mirror was too low for him. “This good-for-nothing pimp,” his mother, finding him in the way, started up again, gray with rage. “Enough, Ma,” Alduccio burst out, “I’m fed up with you!” “You, I’m fed up with you,” replied his mother, even louder. Alduccio began to sing, leaning toward the mirror. “Work, you don’t work, help around the house, you don’t help . . . ” “Ma,” Alduccio interrupted her, “I’m telling you, I’m fed up, will you stop it?” “I’m not gonna stop at all,” she cried. “If I feel like making a fuss, I make a fuss when I want to, you understand, Mr. Fucking Dandy!” “Let me out of here,” said Alduccio, in a fury, and he left, his hair carefully combed, slamming the broken door. He didn’t even look at his sister, who was squatting on the stairs with her skirt pulled down to her heels. She was so pale she looked green, and her painted lips were like a cut. Her hair fell smooth and dry on her neck, with a few locks hanging over her eyes. “Shameless!” was Alduccio’s thought, as he left. Ever since she had got into trouble with the son of Sor’Anita, the fruit seller who lived at the corner, there hadn’t been a moment’s peace at Alduccio’s house. Now she was supposed to get married, but the son of the fruit seller couldn’t stand her anymore. The night she’d been thrown out of the house, he had kept her company, sleeping with her outside, on the steps in front of where he lived, in Building III: but only to show off to people. After she realized she was pregnant, they became engaged, even though, before, neither her parents nor his had wanted it. Humiliated, she had cut the veins in her wrists with a piece of glass, and had nearly died; and in fact her wrists still had two fresh scars.
Waiting for Begalone, Alduccio took a little walk through the neighborhood. The storm had dissipated and the air was warm, almost springlike. Begalone had changed, too; he had tied a handkerchief around his neck, knotted jauntily, and had combed his tow-colored hair smoothly, into a kind of crust, parted on one side and long over his neck. “Bégalo!” Alduccio called. “How much do you have?” Begalone asked immediately. “Thirty lire,” said Alduccio. “Just enough for the bus,” said Begalone. “Me, too!” “And the rest, what about it?” Alduccio asked suspiciously. “It’s here, right here!” said Begalone, hitting his back pocket where he had folded up the hundred and fifty lire stolen from Caciotta. “That’ll be enough for a couple of cigarettes, too,” said Alduccio, as they passed by the bar. “Hold it, Ardù!” answered Begalone. “Bye-bye!” he said to the bus that was passing. “There’ll be another,” Alduccio said, stretching cheerfully.
Begalone hadn’t eaten, either. And under his yellow hair his face had a yellowish color, verging on green, against which his reddish freckles stood out. He was so weak that not even the fever could give him a bit of color: and he had a temperature of at least six or seven degrees above normal, as he’d had every evening, ever since he was released from Forlanini; he’d had tuberculosis for two or three years, and there was nothing else to do now, he had maybe another year to live . . .
Walking with Aldo he ran the palms of his hands over his empty stomach, bending forward and cursing his brothers, his father, and most of all that poor woman his mother, who one night—it had been the first in a series of terrible nights—had jumped out of bed shrieking like a lunatic that she had seen the devil. She said a snake had come into the room and was coiled at the foot of the bed, staring at her, forcing her to strip naked; and she had begun to shout. Then all day long, suddenly, she would start shrieking again, and, whimpering like a dog with a headache that she was fainting, she clung to her daughters or anyone nearby so that they would protect her against that thing that she alone understood. The next night she woke up screaming again: but this time it wasn’t the devil. In fact she had moved over on the unmade bed, to leave some room for someone, although her body, as thin as an anchovy, didn’t take up much space. Sitting next to her on the gray sheets was—as she later recounted—a dead girl: dead, at least judging by how she was dressed, in her good dress, white wool stockings, and a crown of orange blossoms, because a few days later she was supposed to be married. She had begun to complain to Begalone’s mother saying that they had put a petticoat on her that was too short, that the crown of flowers was too tight and hurt her temples, and then she complained that they weren’t saying enough Masses for her, that Pisciasotto, a little cousin of hers, never came to see her in the cemetery, and so on in this vein. Begalone’s mamma had never known this girl, but the next day the neighborhood, commenting on those shrieks emerging in the middle of the night from the broken windows of Begalone’s apartment and echoing through the courtyards of the complex, ascertained that the dead girl was a relative of some people who lived a few doors down in the same building: all the characteristics corresponded perfectly, including the little cousin Pisciasotto, who in fact existed, alive and happy in the neighborhood of Prenestino. Then the devil began to appear again, under various guises: one time a snake, another a bear, yet another a neighbor, whose teeth grew like fangs, and they went in and out of Bégalo’s house as if it were theirs, tormenting his mother. Finally the family had decided to do something, and had brought from Naples an old relative who was skilled in such matters. First, this relative boiled all the objects that belonged to Begalone’s mamma: 20 kilowatts of gas disappeared in a few days because of that boiling, and no one took care of dinner. The three brothers, the four sisters, and all the neighbors were preoccupied with getting rid of the spell. They had found in the pillow belonging to Bégalo’s mamma feathers twisted into the shape of doves, crosses, crowns, and had immediately boiled them: they had also dropped some pieces of iron into boiling oil and then thrown them in cold water, to see what shapes emerged, and for two or three days the only thing you could hear in the house was the sound of the metal hitting the floor in order to make circles around the one under the spell, who did nothing but plead and complain.
“They could at least have given me a piece of bread, but not even that, those jerks,” said Begalone, pressing the pit of his stomach. “Here we’re one hungrier than the next,” said Alduccio, laughing, his handsome face disfigured by a sneer of mocking resignation. They stuck their hands in their pockets and walked the rest of the way to Monte del Pecoraro.
* * *
There was a heat that wasn’t sirocco and wasn’t burning, but only heat. It was like a coat of paint given to the breeze, to the yellow walls of the neighborhoods, to the fields, to the carts, to the buses with clusters of people at the windows. A coat of paint that was all the happiness and the misery of summer nights of the present and the past. The air was taut and buzzing like the skin of a drum; the piss that streaked the sidewalk, even if fresh, was dry; the piles of garbage disintegrated, turning brown, with no odor. Only the stones and the sun-warmed metal shutters had an odor: maybe with wet wash lying around, dried and stiffened by the heat. In the gardens that remained here and there, growing vegetables, untended, as fine and fat as in an earthly paradise, there wasn’t a drop of dew. And in the neighborhood centers, at the intersections, as in Tiburtino, people thronged, rushed, shouted, so that it seemed to be the slums of Shanghai: even in the most solitary places there was chaos, with groups of men going in search of a whore, stopping to chat in the mechanics’ shops that were still open, the motorcycles outside. And past Tiburtino there was Tor dei Schiavi, Borghetto Prenestino, Acqua Bullicante, Maranella, Mandrione, Porta Furba, Quarticciolo, Quadraro . . . A hundred ot
her centers like the one at Tiburtino: with a sea of people at the traffic light, gradually scattering into the surrounding streets—which had cracked sidewalks and were as noisy as entrance halls—and along the colossal ruins of the walls with rows of hovels at the foot. And bands of young men who were racing with their scooters, Lambretta, Ducati, or Mondial, half drunk, their greasy overalls open over black chests, or all dressed up so that they seemed to have emerged from a display window in Piazza Vittorio. All a great encirclement of Rome, between Rome and the surrounding countryside, with hundreds of thousands of human lives swarming through the apartment blocks, the evacuees’ houses, or the skyscrapers. And all that life wasn’t only in the neighborhoods of the periphery but in Rome, too, in the center of the city, maybe near the cupola of San Pietro: yes, right at the cupola, you had only to stick your nose outside the colonnade of Piazza San Pietro, in the direction of Porta Cavalleggeri, and there it was, shouting, impatient, mocking, in groups and gangs around the cinemas, the pizzerias, dispersing a little farther on, in Via del Gelsomino, in Via della Cava, in the open spaces of packed earth rimmed with piles of garbage where boys play ball during the day, in couples among the bushes covered with old pieces of newspaper between Via delle Fornaci and the Gianicolo . . . And down below, past the dripping tunnel, it’s all the same, in Piazza della Rovere, where lines of tourists pass, heads high, arm in arm, in knickers and heavy shoes, singing Alpine songs in chorus, while the punks leaning against the parapet of the Tiber, near a clogged latrine, in their pegged pants and pointy shoes, look at them, saying, behind their backs, with bored and sarcastic expressions, words that, if understood, would give the tourists a stroke. And along the banks of the Tiber where the rare trams pass clattering on the uneven cobblestones under the arcades of plane trees, and the scooters go wild around the curve, a guy or two on board in search of trouble; toward Castel Sant’Angelo, with, at its foot, on the surface of the river, the Ciriola bathing barge all lighted up; toward Piazza del Popolo, elegant as a grand theater, the Pincio, and Villa Borghese, with the hum of violins and the muted calls to the whores or the faggots, who pass in a herd singing “Sentimental,” with lowered eyelids and sagging mouths, glancing out of the corner of an eye to see if the police van is arriving. Or, on the other side, in the direction of Ponte Sisto, where, under the dirty, sparkling Funtanone, two teams of Trastevere youths are playing a match, shouting violently, and running like a flock of sheep between the tires of the Fiat 1900s carrying sharp-looking guys and their whores from Cinecittà to dinner at Antica Pesa: while from all the alleys of Trastevere, beyond the fountain, comes the rustle of male and female jaws eating a pizza or a crostino, in the open air, in Piazza Sant’Egidio or Via del Mattonato, with little boys whining or kids squabbling, running over the paving stones, light as the dirty bits of paper tossed here and there by the breeze.
The Street Kids Page 18